Thursday, 1 November 2007

The last eight months must have been the most hectic ones I have
experienced. This started out with my leaving the TU/e and starting at
Jaiku. Apart from microblogging effectively
killing any urge to write in this blog, there weren't many dull moments
since then.

The most important happening last summer, that I've documented on
Jaiku but not here, was the birth of my daughter Birgit on 28 June. I
don't think I've ever been more proud and happy than at the instance I
first held her. Watching her grow up and discover the world around her
is awesome. Her smiles make every day a joy.

About a month ago, it was announced that Jaiku has been acquired by
Google. Many people contacted me to congratulate me on this news, and
I'd like to thank you all! I feel it is a compliment to the great team
I've had the pleasure of working with and to our community of users and
application developers that helped made Jaiku what it is today.

Naturally, the acquisition didn't happen in a day, so leading up to
that there were a lot of questions that kept us and our families busy
for a while. What will happen? Will we need to move? When? Where?
Exciting and Exhausting at the same time. Eventually the deal obviously
took place, and most of the team have left for the Bay Area for a few
months, while some didn't. I was one of the guys that was not included
in the acquisition, so I'm not moving after all. We had a great
combined Valve/Jaiku/Thinglink new office warming but also Jaiku
farewell party, though, and I'd like to say thanks to all my former
colleagues for the great experience it has been. For the forseeable
future, I will be associated with Jaiku, the service, but not in any
official capacity.

So what now? As of today I am officially employed by Mediamatic Lab, where I will
continue work on XMPP publish-subscribe technologies and open
standards. More on that later, though.